The irony is that there's nothing absolutely Argentine about La libertad. Its freedom is a freedom from nationality, time-space, narrative laws, camera laws and the expectations that audiences instinctively impose on themselves. But pay attention to the actual translation of the Spanish title: "Liberty"--a harder, more profound word than "freedom," a word pointing to a greater leap, a commitment to an ideal, an identifier for an equation that even describes its opposition--oppression. Liberty is harder-won. Liberty is that thing that the films that really matter aspire to. This one just has the balls to take it as its own name.

A film about Misael, who cuts trees and shapes them into logs for sale. A film, really, about what Misael does--searching for his trees, wandering, taking a shit, finding, chopping, shaving, napping, stacking, moving them to a distribution point, returning to his base camp labeled "Los errantes," finding an armadillo for dinner, killing it, cutting it up, building a fire for the grill, grilling it, stacking the loose brush from his woodcutting, burning the brush, finishing the grilling, eating the armadillo (the hard shell forms a dish, as the dead tail wags back and forth), looking into the camera as lightning approaches. Active progressive verbs for an active progressive film that moves forward at every moment, considers every moment precious and immediate and the one thing right now--right. now.---that matters and nothing else. There are few films that encompass a world, a state of existence so purely and totally. Many have noted that Alonso's film is one of those ultimate affirmations of Andre Bazin's ideal cinema, the emphatic assertion of the real on screen. It allows the eye to pay absolute attention to what Misael is doing, because what he's doing not only is what counts, but what defines him. So in that sense, you have the essence of character. But there's the matching factor that almost nothing is even close to being "acted." Certainly not "written." La libertad is arranged and choreographed, an attentive contemplation on a human in nature. The big lie, by the way, is that this is ''minimalism." (The same way we hear Apichatpong Weerasethakul described as ''minimalist.") No--this is maximalism, a cinema containing everything needed for its own value and purpose, and that has the effect of growing in the mind, either as the viewer recalls it, or sees it again.